10th December 2017, 20:54 Edited(This post was last modified: 10th December 2017, 20:56 by rocky7x.)

I think we are running in circles here. To get the updates, you have to enable the Testing repository - there is no other way. But you cannot just blindly run the apt-get upgrade and install everything, because it will definitely screw up the system. You have to update the stuff one by one carefully and read the bug reports, which you can get using the apt-listbugs tool, which should be run and its output studied BEFORE EACH UPGRADE:

Or you can install Netrunner 17.06, switch the repos to Debian stable and run the stable branch of Debian, which is safe for running apt-get upgrade blindly, but you will not get Plasma upgrades, since they are based on Debian Testing

(10th December 2017, 20:54)rocky7x Wrote: I think we are running in circles here. To get the updates, you have to enable the Testing repository - there is no other way. But you cannot just blindly run the apt-get upgrade and install everything, because it will definitely screw up the system. You have to update the stuff one by one carefully and read the bug reports, which you can get using the apt-listbugs tool, which should be run and its output studied BEFORE EACH UPGRADE:

Or you can install Netrunner 17.06, switch the repos to Debian stable and run the stable branch of Debian, which is safe for running apt-get upgrade blindly, but you will not get Plasma upgrades, since they are based on Debian Testing

so, after the dead of maui, the best distro ever, i got several options, if I want a real plasma/kde-distro:

change to neon, but that is no real distro

change to netrunner 17.10 but here i will every few days destroy my installation, because I will not be able to handle this fucking crazy testing-repitory-thing

change to netrunner 17.06 which is pretty save but i will not get an plasma update which does not make any sense

change to whatever (suse?)

Since about fourteen years I have been using now kubuntu/netrunner/maui and now again netrunner. And never have been so deeply disappointed since.

Hey, but even when they don't call Neon a distro, you can consider it as Ubuntu LTS with a big Plasma PPA on top. So basically, if you install Neon, invest some time in installing all needed apps (the time Maui devs did for you) and then run it juuuust a little bit more carefully than you did Maui, you will have pretty much the same experience as with Maui. Just follow this reasoning:
1. When a new major version of Plasma comes out, so for example 5.12.0 don't upgrade
2. Wait for 2 weeks until 5.12.2 comes out, then upgrade it on your own Virtualbox and give it half an hour of clicking just to know basic stuff still works
3. If all OK upgrade the system, if not wait until 5.12.3 and so on
4. Do this with all following minor upgrades if you want them until a new major release comes, so 5.13.0
5. Again, wait for 2 weeks until 5.13.2 comes out. And so on, I guess you understand.

The KDE release cadence is based of Fibonacci, so first point release after 1 week, second after 1 more week, third after next 2 weeks and so on, until fifth point release. After that it's next major release and so on. It works for non-LTS versions and I think if you skip the first 2 weeks after major version, you are pretty much safe, if you of course do some basic Virtualbox testing, just to be double sure.

(11th December 2017, 0:58)rocky7x Wrote: Hey, but even when they don't call Neon a distro, you can consider it as Ubuntu LTS with a big Plasma PPA on top. So basically, if you install Neon, invest some time in installing all needed apps (the time Maui devs did for you) and then run it juuuust a little bit more carefully than you did Maui, you will have pretty much the same experience as with Maui. Just follow this reasoning:
1. When a new major version of Plasma comes out, so for example 5.12.0 don't upgrade
2. Wait for 2 weeks until 5.12.2 comes out, then upgrade it on your own Virtualbox and give it half an hour of clicking just to know basic stuff still works
3. If all OK upgrade the system, if not wait until 5.12.3 and so on
4. Do this with all following minor upgrades if you want them until a new major release comes, so 5.13.0
5. Again, wait for 2 weeks until 5.13.2 comes out. And so on, I guess you understand.

rocky7x what do you think of unchecking neon mirrors after you got a stable release ?
SM

(11th December 2017, 17:19)rocky7x Wrote: Of course you can disable the neon repo, but then you will not get any updates for Plasma, only updates that come via the Ubuntu channels. But of course, it's a possibility to have a stable system.

So this could be a solution for my friends, I can then choose the moment to tell them to activate theses mirrors with the minimum of risk.
Thanks.
SM

(10th December 2017, 20:54)rocky7x Wrote: I think we are running in circles here. To get the updates, you have to enable the Testing repository - there is no other way. But you cannot just blindly run the apt-get upgrade and install everything, because it will definitely screw up the system. You have to update the stuff one by one carefully and read the bug reports, which you can get using the apt-listbugs tool, which should be run and its output studied BEFORE EACH UPGRADE:

Or you can install Netrunner 17.06, switch the repos to Debian stable and run the stable branch of Debian, which is safe for running apt-get upgrade blindly, but you will not get Plasma upgrades, since they are based on Debian Testing

so, after the dead of maui, the best distro ever, i got several options, if I want a real plasma/kde-distro:

change to neon, but that is no real distro

change to netrunner 17.10 but here i will every few days destroy my installation, because I will not be able to handle this fucking crazy testing-repitory-thing

change to netrunner 17.06 which is pretty save but i will not get an plasma update which does not make any sense

change to whatever (suse?)

Since about fourteen years I have been using now kubuntu/netrunner/maui and now again netrunner. And never have been so deeply disappointed since.

Why are you doing this? Why?

Dieter

Actually I think there is another, better option. If you use apt-get dist-upgrade you will get the rolling updates to plasma WITHOUT destroying your system (unless there is a mistake in netrunner-backports).

Seems plasma packages in the Netrunner backports are not compatible with the qt updates in the debian testing repo?

I was able to upgrade a few non-Qt packages like "libreoffice" using the
"sudo apt-get install (package name) -f" command.

Now what remains is mostly Qt related;
Be cautious when using the "dist-upgrade" command which can break your OS, same with the GUI counterparts like "Synaptic". Only use them, when they are not removing required packages as in the examples below. The use of "upgrade" is the safer of the two commands as of now, after running the "update" command.

I will paste here an excerpt from the apt-get manual:Using upgrade keeps to the rule: under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed. If that's important to you, use apt-get upgrade. If you want things to "just work", you probably want apt-get dist-upgrade to ensure dependencies are resolved.

What it means is that upgrade just blindly upgrades the packages that are already installed and have an upgrade available. That is much more dangerous that using dist-upgrade, which resolves the dependency equations also for packages that must be removed or additionally installed. Using only upgrade with a lot of packages in the queue, especially with system related packages can destroy your system (and probably in most cases will).

upgrade
Upgrade will attempt to gently upgrade the whole system. Upgrade will never install a new package or remove an existing package, nor will it ever upgrade a package that might cause some other package to break. This can be used daily to relatively safely upgrade the system. Upgrade will list all of the packages that it could not upgrade, this usually means that they depend on new packages or conflict with some other package. dselect or apt-get install can be used to force these packages to install.

install
Install is used to install packages by name. The package is automatically fetched and installed. This can be useful if you already know the name of the package to install and do not want to go into a GUI to select it. Any number of packages may be passed to install, they will all be fetched. Install automatically attempts to resolve dependency problems with the listed packages and will print a summary and ask for confirmation if anything other than its arguments are changed.

dist-upgrade
Dist-upgrade is a complete upgrader designed to simplify upgrading between releases of Debian. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine the best set of packages to install, upgrade and remove to get as much of the system to the newest release. In some situations it may be desired to use dist-upgrade rather than spend the time manually resolving dependencies in dselect. Once dist-upgrade has completed then dselect can be used to install any packages that may have been left out.

It is important to closely look at what dist-upgrade is going to do, its decisions may sometimes be quite surprising. [[Blindly running this command may break your OS, as noted in my previous post]]

apt-get has several command line options that are detailed in its man page, apt-get(8). The most useful option is -d which does not install the fetched files. If the system has to download a large number of packages it would be undesired to start installing them in case something goes wrong. When -d is used the downloaded archives can be installed by simply running the command that caused them to be downloaded again without -d.

KDE neon does continuous deployment of the latest KDE software which means there are nearly always new versions of our software to update to. We recommend using Plasma Discover's updater which appears in your panel:
If you prefer to use the command line you can use the pkcon command:pkcon refreshpkcon update
This will install all new packages and uses the same PackageKit code as Plasma Discover. Some uses of apt do not install new packages which makes it less suitable for KDE neon.